Crescent City Rhapsody
Signals from space destroy are destroying the world!
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Crescent City Rhapsody
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By Kathleen Ann Goonan
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Avon EOS
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$24.00/$36.50 Canada
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Hardcover, Feb. 2000
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ISBN 0-380-97711-7
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Review by A.M. Dellamonica
 arie Laveau is the unacknowledged ruler of the city of New Orleans. On
an Earth that is nearly ready to integrate high-tech communications with
the nascent science of nanotechnology, she is ever watchful for discoveries
that might threaten or improve the lives of her people. Her enemies are
varied and powerful, but when she is gunned down in the year 2012, Marie has
already laid plans to thwart them. Purchasing an expensive, if imperfect,
form of resurrection, she survives the homicide attempt, only to discover
that her husband and child have been murdered, too.
But a larger disaster facing the whole planet subsumes Marie's eager quest to find the killers. Periodic electromagnetic pulses have begun knocking out electronic communications all over the world.
During these "Silences," fewer and fewer telephones, computers, and radios
are able to operate. Instrument-dependent airplanes crash, and power outages
create havoc and riots. Instead of wedding nanotech to the existing high-tech architecture of the world--the Internet, global satellite networks and
fiber-optic datanets--the new technology is pressed into service to find
ways to replace the crumbling global communications network. Countries
and corporations that are suddenly cut off from one another haphazardly develop DNA computers
and pheromone-based communications.
It is not long before Marie learns that the United States government is
suppressing any information that might explain the source of the Silences.
Children born nine months after the first electromagnetic pulse are being
apprehended and studied, and scientists with expertise on the phenomena
begin to disappear and die. Still mourning the loss of her family, Marie
must nevertheless try to protect New Orleans--from Gaia-worshipping
terrorists, from rogue nanotech plagues and, most of all, from a powerful
government agency determined to suppress the truth about the Silences.
Beautiful and inventive
Crescent City Rhapsody is atypical of most nanotech-oriented SF,
which often presents the technology as a fait accompli, already fully
developed and capable of near-magical achievements. Instead, Kathleen Ann
Goonan draws a portrait of nanotech in its infancy--a messy hodgepodge of
unrelated research pursued by hundreds of laboratories, all with differing
goals and ideologies. People spread across the moral spectrum carry out the scientific research in Crescent City Rhapsody, and the results vary from staggeringly dangerous to transcendentally beautiful. The
ways in which these rapidly created technologies are used, and the fact that
they must coexist and interact with each other, are utterly true to life.
With a multinational cast of characters and an intricate web of
story lines, Crescent City Rhapsody traces the staggering alteration
of Earth from the first Silence in 2012 to the culmination of a government
siege of New Orleans in 2039. Goonan's plotting is masterful, and she orchestrates the
characters' inevitable collision at the end of the novel in
a lovely and complicated fashion. The resolution of the story--while leaving
plenty of room for further exploration--is satisfying and potent.
Additionally, Crescent City Rhapsody celebrates art in many forms. Music and sculpture, just as much as science, are critical elements of Marie's hopes and dreams for a truly
liberated humanity. Goonan's emphasis on human-created beauty is
delightful, the more so in a genre often far more concerned
with the achievements of science and scientists. The emotional, artistic and
spiritual impulses of individuals, both good and bad, play significant roles
in determining the directions taken by the Silence-altered human race.
With so many facets to explore and revisit, a single
reading of Crescent City Rhapsody might not be enough. This novel can be enjoyed again and again.
Incredibly cool and very humane. Goonan doesn't offer easy answers or try to
smooth over her morally complex universe by offering an unrealistically tidy
ending. The music-based structure of the novel is also terrific.
-- Alyx
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Distance Haze
God spelled backward is DNA
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Distance Haze
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By Jamil Nasir
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Bantam Books
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$5.99/$8.99 Canada
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Paperback, March 2000
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ISBN 0-533-57995-9
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Review by Mark Wilson
 ayne Dolan's life has become as empty and stale as his post-divorce,
view-of-the-parking-lot apartment. His visions of life
as an illuminati have turned to dust as his latest science fiction novels
lie remaindered and unread; his ex-wife angrily shields his kids from their
no-good father. He agrees to a dubious-sounding assignment--to write a semi-fictional
book about a peculiar institute researching the scientific aspects of
religion--because he has no better prospects.
At the institute, which is tucked away in corner of Michigan, Wayne learns that its motley assortment of scientists and crackpots has divided
into two hostile camps based on belief in an afterlife. Wayne is
bemused by the research projects under way: a hat for measuring religious
brain waves; psychic tests involving recently dead subjects; a sensory
deprivation tank for nirvana on demand. The institute's star scientist has
identified a region of the brain that strives to assign "higher"
meaning, and says our cognitive functioning would improve without it.
Although at first he's only looking for novel fodder among the quirky researchers, Wayne becomes intensely interested in their work and opinions as he starts
experiencing strange dreams and visions of a green continent. Many of the visions
feature an eerily beautiful woman or a serene Native American shaman who patiently
explains the relationship between layers of reality.
Wayne is both entranced and alarmed as his fantasies intrude more and more
into his waking life and are accompanied by increasingly uncharacteristic
behavior--like falling in love with a bitter, beautiful crippled
woman he meets in a Laundromat. Suddenly he learns that he himself is being
experimented on by an unscrupulous scientist, and Wayne may meet his maker--or
oblivion--before he can understand what's been happening to him and what it
all means.
Ally McBeal meets God
Making the hero of an SF novel an SF novelist is pretty cheeky--it looks
like a stab at reinforcing the story's realism through an unconscious
association between narrator and author. Fortunately, Wayne Dolan is a
compelling everyguy. His anxiety over his stagnant life, his perplexity
and enchantment at the increasingly vivid dreams, and the conflicted joy he
feels are powerful, visceral emotions that drive and develop him. And it turns out that his vocation is a gateway to his imagination and the fantasies that develop there.
So what about Nasir's other device--his suspense-dissipating,
decide-for-yourself approach to what's "really" happening to Wayne? Those
visions could be just a brain-chemical cocktail, or externally induced
hallucinations, or a manifestation of another reality--and what does
"reality" mean anyway? Nasir may be hedging, or he may be striving for a
deeper truth: that there is no single understanding of humanity's
relationship with the universe. There is one clue: Wayne's random encounter
with the estranged daughter of the institute's most controversial scientist
is either otherworldly intervention or pure plot contrivance.
Distance Haze is vibrantly written and generally fun to read, with
cute moments like Wayne staring slack-jawed at the naked dancing women at
the house down the road, or the dead Native American whose prerequisite to revelation
is a $5,000 deposit in an account at the Farmers' Bank. Like Wayne's life,
these light moments are mixed with material that's sober and occasionally disturbing.
Some people yearn for an Answer to the baffling nature of life on Earth, and
expect novels about religion to furnish one. Nasir has prudently provided
instead a collection of things to think about, couched in the interesting
story of a man changed by strange experiences. Is it plausible? God only knows.
Though few SF novels are overtly concerned with religion per se, staring into the depths of space and time seems to lead inevitably to thoughts of God and meaning. It could be
argued that the science fiction writers of the last 120 years have
contributed as much to our understanding of metaphysical issues as have all the
philosophers of the past millennium
-- Mark
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